In portable electronic equipments, such as a lap-top PC (Personal Computer), there are demands to reduce the thickness of the electronic equipment, or to reduce the overall size of the electronic equipment.
Many electronic equipments have a structure in which a circuit board having electronic parts mounted thereon is accommodated within a housing or a casing. When a relatively large electronic part is mounted on the circuit board, the overall thickness of the circuit board, including the electronic part, becomes relatively large. Consequently, the housing that accommodates the circuit board needs to have a thickness that would allow the circuit board to be accommodated therein, and the overall thickness of the electronic equipment increases, contrary to the demands to reduce the thickness of the electronic equipment. In addition, when the relatively large electronic part is mounted on the circuit board, a dead space is likely generated between the housing and portions of the circuit board other than the portion where the electronic part is mounted. The generation of the dead space may also be contrary to the demands to reduce the thickness and the size of the electronic equipment. A SSD (Solid State Drive) is an example of such an electronic equipment that becomes relatively large. The SSD is a storage device having a large storage capacity, and may replace a HDD (Hard Disk Drive) conventionally implemented in the lap-top PC or the like.
The problem described above may occur when the relatively large electronic part, such as the SSD, is mounted on the circuit board. Hence, it may be conceivable to accommodate the relatively large electronic part within the housing, separately from the circuit board, by accommodating the relatively large electronic part in a region within the housing other than the region in which the circuit board is provided, along an in-plane direction of the circuit board. In this conceivable case, it may be possible to avoid the overall thickness of the housing from becoming a sum of the thickness of the circuit board and the thickness of the electronic part. However, the electronic part must be stably held in the housing, separately from the circuit board. When the electronic part is fixed directly on the housing by screws, the electronic part is easily affected by external forces applied on the housing. On the other hand, when the electronic part is fixed on the housing via a shock absorbing material, the number of parts increases to thereby increase the cost of the electronic equipment as a whole.
For example, a FPC (Flexible Printed Circuit) has been proposed which may be bent or folded. In addition, an arrangement has been proposed in which a liquid crystal panel and a battery are arranged side by side on a plane, in order to reduce the thickness of a wrist watch, for example.